One Night Stand

by Brooks, Sarah J.

  She had been trying to sneak out, and honestly, if I had been the one to catch her, I would have encouraged her to head off before Erin got up. It wasn’t that I didn’t want them around each other—hell, it was a little late given that she had taken care of her the night before—but if Erin had caught her staying over, that would have been hellish to explain. Erin had never really known me to be with a woman, given that Samantha had dropped out of the picture pretty swiftly after she was born, and her mother had only been in her life very intermittently since then. Samantha had made a couple of moves on me since she left, but I knew her too well to fall for that shit. She wasn’t trustworthy, and there was no way I was putting either myself or Erin through the shit she pulled if I could avoid it.

  But Nina had come up with a decent excuse for being back in the apartment, and Erin was young enough to probably not notice that she was wearing the same clothes as the night before and hadn’t made it home after we’d sent her to bed. Even if she did figure it out, she didn’t make a big deal of it—in fact, she seemed glad that Nina had stuck around, and she insisted on us having breakfast together. Which was more fun than I’d care to admit, even to myself.

  Eating together like that had felt dangerously close to normal, and I knew that I had to get myself in hand and not let it get to my head. Because yes, having Nina around was awesome. I loved coming home to someone after a long day of work, loved being able to have sex again, loved having someone to help out with Erin in the morning—someone who Erin seemed to adore as well. It couldn’t have been more perfect. And yet, I barely knew this woman. Even though I felt like I knew her sexually back to front, that there was a click of understanding between us that I couldn’t shake. We had barely had more than twenty minutes of conversation at a time without being cut off by something. That wasn’t enough time to decide whether I actually wanted this woman in my life, or in my daughter’s. And yet, just thinking about her—thinking about the kiss we shared that morning before I left the apartment, the way she had responded to my advance—I just wanted to duck work, head back to the apartment, and spend the whole rest of the day with her.

  That was the thing about having kids—it meant that I couldn’t just waste away those long, fun hours with someone new, getting to know each other inside out and enjoying that first flush of new romance. Things were always going to be limited between us because of Erin. I couldn’t just dump my daughter off and go on a date—well, I could, but the only person I could do that with was Ant, and if she found out what was going on between Nina and me, I had a feeling it was going to blow up in my face.

  So for the time being, I would just have to stick to hoping that things carried on the way they were between us. It was a weird little limbo to be stuck in, and I didn’t want to keep her in there with me if she didn’t want it, but at the same time, there was no way I was going to try to cut things off now. No matter how much the logical part of my brain told me that it was the right choice, I wanted to get to know this woman. I didn’t believe in fate or destiny, but if I did, that’s exactly how I would have described her just happening to move in downstairs from me just when I felt like I needed someone new in my life.

  I happily carried on with my shift and found my mind drifting back to Nina all the time. What was she doing? I would love to bring her down here to cook for her at some point, so I could actually show her what I could do with something more than pancakes. Or maybe I’d take her out to somewhere else in the city, somewhere one of my old friends from culinary school would be able to set us up with a good table and cheap wine where we could spend the night talking and …

  “Hey, Logan?” Elijah stopped me in my tracks as I went to put a tray in the oven.

  I blinked and looked up at him. “Yeah?”

  “Your phone’s ringing.” He jerked his head toward the cloakroom. “It’s been going on and off for ten minutes. You should really deal with it, make sure it’s not something serious.”

  “Shit,” I muttered, and I dried my hands off and headed to take the call. “Thanks for letting me know, Elijah.”

  “No problem,” he called back. “Let me know what’s going on, alright?”

  “Will do,” I replied, and I closed the door behind me and grabbed my phone from my pocket. My heart sank when I saw who was on the other end of the line, but I knew I had to take the call.

  “Samantha, hey.” I brought the phone to my ear and tried to keep my voice reasonably upbeat so she couldn’t sense the wince on my face as I greeted her. How long had it been since I heard from her? She had sent me a gift for Erin two months after her birthday, and I had decided to hold it over till the next year, so my daughter could at least pretend that her mother actually gave a shit about her.

  “Logan, I’ve been calling you and calling you,” she snapped. “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “I’m at work, Sam,” I told her. “I can’t just drop everything to take your calls, I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I’m the mother of your child,” she shot back, as though she had ever acted like Erin’s mother at any point over the course of her damn life.

  “Yeah, I know, but I can’t always just—”

  “Anyway, I need to speak to you,” she cut me off, and I could hear her long nails drumming on top of something; when we had been dating that had always been a major pet peeve of mine, the fact that she always had those long, pointed talons that she seemed to drum off everything in reaching distance. Including me, sometimes.

  “Do you?” I asked. “Can this wait till later? Service is about to start, and I need to get back to—”

  “No, it can’t,” she snapped back. “I need to talk to you about Erin.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” I asked tiredly. I knew I was being a sarcastic ass, but just speaking to her for this long was giving me a damn stress headache. The sooner this could be over with, the better.

  “You need to let me see her,” she told me loftily. “I’m in the city, and I want to see her.”

  “If you want to set up a schedule to actually spend time with her, then we can work something out—”

  “You really think I’m going to let you fuck me over like that again?” she demanded, scoffing as though the very thought was ridiculous. “You always try to keep me away from her.”

  “No, I don’t,” I reminded her. “You never want to set up anything regular with her. If you did, I’d be happy to work something out, and we can take it from there.”

  “You know that I don’t have time to set up a schedule.” She sighed heavily as though I was asking her something that I should have already known would be literally impossible for her to maintain.

  “Why not?” I pressed. Usually, I would just nod along until she hung up the phone and forgot to call back for another two months, but today I was feeling bolder. Maybe it was the night with Nina, or maybe it was the note that she’d somehow gotten to my work. I didn’t want to fuck with her today, and that was her problem for calling me.

  “Because I’m going in and out of the city with my work!” she exclaimed, clearly pissed.

  “And what work are you doing right now?” I pressed.

  “I’ve just got my massage certification,” she told me, pleased with herself. “I’m traveling with a salon.”

  “Sounds very high-class,” I shot back, and she sighed heavily again, a rush of static filling my ear down the phone.

  “I’m telling you, I’m getting my life together, and now I want my daughter back,” she replied, and my heart stopped dead in my chest.

  “What do you mean, you want her back?” I began to pace the small space of the cloakroom, feeling like my eyes were going to pop out of my head.

  “I mean, I want to see her,” she swiftly corrected herself, but she had already shot herself in the foot and revealed her true intentions.

  “You want to see her, or you want to take her?” I demanded. “You really think I’m just going to let you walk back into my daughter’s life—”


  “Our daughter,” she reminded me, but I shook my head.

  “No, not our daughter, my daughter,” I corrected her. “I’m the one who’s actually been raising her these last nine years, you remember? After you fucking dumped the two of us and took off?”

  “Sounds like you’re not over it,” she purred. “I’m sure I could do something to make it right, baby …”

  “I’m not over the fact that you abandoned the most important person in my life,” I shot back, really pissed now. “I don’t give a shit that you left me. In fact, I’m glad you did. My life is a million times better without you in it, and you should know that.”

  “Fine,” she fired back, irritated that her ploy to seduce me had already failed. She always tried it, as though I had just been sitting around all these years waiting for her to fall back into bed with me so we could play at being a happy family. Well, that wasn’t how this worked. That wasn’t how any of this worked.

  “You need to let me see her.” She turned back to her original tack. “You have to see how ridiculous you’re being, right?”

  “I’m not the one calling up out of nowhere after months of not making an effort and acting like we owe you something,” I reminded her.

  “Hey, I sent her that present, didn’t I?” she protested.

  “Two months late,” I reminded her. “I haven’t even given it to her yet. It’s going to be for next year, so I can at least pretend that her mother knows when her fucking birthday is.”

  “She’s just as much a part of me as she is a part of you,” she hissed down the line, her anger flashing up in a rush. She had never had a good grasp of her temper, and clearly, nothing had changed with regards to that.

  “That’s not true, and you can’t play that card at me anymore,” I reminded her. “You tried, remember? The last dozen fucking times you tried to pull this shit on me. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not dumb enough or hopeful enough to think that you’ve actually changed. You need to prove it to me, not call me up and tell me what the fuck I’m going to do with my life.”

  “You’re a fucking asshole,” she snapped, and I could hear her fingers drumming more agitatedly.

  “Yeah, probably,” I agreed. “But I’d rather be an asshole to you than a bad father to her.”

  “It’s going to scar her, you know, growing up without a mother,” she warned me, and for a moment my memory jumped to Nina and Erin that morning, the two of them getting ready for school together. A smile flickered onto my face at the memory, even though I knew I shouldn’t have let it stick like that.

  “It’s going to scar her more having someone like you around,” I told her firmly. “Call me back, and we can figure something out if you want to, but this has to be on my terms, alright?”

  “Fine,” she shot back, and then she fell silent for a moment. And I knew that I had managed to shut her down this time around. I wanted to punch the air; usually, every conversation I had with Samantha I wound up just backing down to whatever crazy shit she was demanding from me. This was a win as far as I was concerned.

  “Oh, and don’t send me any more notes at work,” I told her, suddenly recalling the thing that I’d found in my coat pocket the week before.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” she demanded. “You sound crazy. I didn’t send you anything at work. I don’t even know where you work. You really think I would care enough to track that down?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I replied, shaking my head. The lady doth protest too much. “Just try to actually communicate like an adult in future, okay? With actual words, to me directly?”

  “Fuck off, Logan,” she snapped back, and just like that she hung up the phone before I even had time to remind her that she had been the one to call me.

  I dumped the phone back in my pocket and took a long deep breath before I headed back out to the floor again. She always got me wound up, even now. Every time I spoke to her, I was reminded of how badly she had fucked over my daughter, and it just made me want to chew her out and tell her everything that I had been brewing on over all these years. But that wouldn’t do any good. She would never listen to me anyway. She never did. I got these calls a few times a year, and for the most part, I was able to shut her down as soon as I indicated that she might actually have to put in the remotest effort; she would slide out of the picture again.

  Which was fine by me because I didn’t want anyone like Samantha near Erin. Samantha was precisely the kind of person who would have been defined as a bad influence; she was mean, short-tempered, had no ambition, and basically put no effort into any part of her life except making herself look good. I was more than happy keeping her away from my daughter and from me. She had seen Erin maybe five times in the last ten years, and most of those had come as a result of me not knowing any better as to say no to her. For a long time, I had believed, as she told me, that a girl needed a mother in her life, and it took me longer than I care to admit to realize that seriously wasn’t the case. At least, not when that mother was Samantha.

  “Everything alright with you?” Elijah asked as I made my way back to the floor. I plastered a smile on my face and nodded.

  “All good,” I assured him. “Just some … family stuff.”

  “Right,” he nodded, and he eyed me for a moment, clearly not buying it. “And it’s all good?”

  “All fine,” I promised him, and then I stopped. “Oh, and if you see a woman with bleached blonde hair and long nails come into this place, could you make sure she doesn’t somehow make it back to the kitchen?”

  “Uh,” Elijah furrowed his brow. “Dare I ask what this is about?”

  “It’s better if you don’t,” I assured him, and he shrugged.

  “Whatever you say. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Thanks, man. I appreciate it.” I nodded, and with that, I turned to get back to work and tried not to let my mind wander to what kind of woman I thought would be a good influence on Erin. And the fact that Nina seemed to fit that bill just perfectly.

  Chapter 11

  Nina

  I arrived back from work, stretched my hands over my head, and was about to crash straight into bed and catch a few hours of a nap before I was due to go out and meet Ant for a drink later that evening. It had been a long-ass day, and I was exhausted. I needed a good long time to catch up on my sleep and make sure that I didn’t just fall apart at the seams in the next twenty minutes. But then, just tucked under the edge of the doormat, I spotted a note. Just a small one, but enough to catch my eye. My heart flipped—was it the landlord, telling me off about playing music too loudly? I picked it up gingerly, pinching it between the tips of my fingers, and turned it over. And when I saw what it actually was, a smile half a mile wide cracked over my face.

  “Nina, come upstairs. I’m waiting for you. Logan x”

  I scrunched the note up in my hands and glanced in the mirror, biting my lip, and wondering what the hell was going on. School was out, and Erin would be home, so what the hell did he have planned for me? Even amid my overthinking brain, I knew that I had to go up there and take him up on the offer; it was just too tempting to resist.

  I took a quick shower, changed my clothes, brushed my hair, and applied a little makeup, hoping I would still pass for ruffled and spontaneous when I got up there a few minutes later. I took the stairs two at a time and paused for a moment before I knocked on his door. I liked lingering in anticipation, imagining what he might have in store for me in there. But I knew anything that I could come up with in my head would be nothing compared to what he might come up with, so I rapped my knuckles on the wood and waited

  A moment or two later, the door opened, and I found Logan standing behind it in nothing but a pair of jeans. I grinned and bit my lip, giving him the once over.

  “I got your note,” I told him, stepping over the threshold.

  “Good.” He grinned and pushed the door shut behind me; there was a look on his face that I couldn’t quite get a read on, but it was sexy as hell,
and seeing him shirtless was enough to send my pulse racing through the ceiling.

  “Where’s Erin?” I asked, and he shrugged

  “I put her into an after-school club for this afternoon,” he said moving toward me so that we were suddenly just an inch or two apart. I could smell him, the scent of him filling my senses from top to bottom and making my toes curl.

  “So we have this place all to ourselves?” I asked, and he nodded, reaching up to brush his thumb over my lips.

  “Thought we could finish up what we started with that kiss,” he murmured, and I grinned and went to lean in and kiss him, but all at once he pulled back just an inch, making me wait for it. I felt my heart flip in my chest.

  “What are you doing?” I asked a little nervously, but with a smile on my face.

  He pushed a strand of hair back from my face. “You’ll see,” he replied, and he leaned forward and caught my bottom lip between his teeth, tugging lightly and making my entire body tingle.

  “Mmm,” I moaned when he pulled back. I couldn’t believe the kind of power he already seemed to have over me; all this time, I had thought I was a little uptight when it came to the bedroom, that I had a hard time giving in to what I really wanted and getting turned on, but with him, I never seemed to have a problem. He was always so calm, so collected, so in-control like he knew precisely what he wanted to do to me.

  “So what exactly do you have in mind?” I asked, and he took my hand and led me through to the bedroom. He paused just before we crossed over the threshold and turned to me with a serious look in his eyes.

  “You know, if any of this freaks you out, you just tell me, right?” He nodded to me. “No problem. I want you to enjoy this as much as I will.”

  “Okay, now you’ve got me interested.” I cocked my head at him. “What exactly might freak me out?”